Ruth Galloway (63 page)

Ruth has been happy to watch Max from a distance. The last thing she wants is to talk to the press – or to Phil. Her own relationship with Max, the bond she feels with him, has been strengthened by Max's appearance on that fateful night. It was Max who turned up in the police car to tell Ruth that he, Cathbad and Nelson had been following her in an electric boat. He told her about Nelson's kamikaze dive into the water. ‘When he thought you were hurt, he just went crazy.' They had looked at each other and Ruth knew that Max knew that Nelson was the father of her baby. Neither of them said anything though. Max held Ruth's hand all the way to the hospital.

Now he is smiling. The dig has been successful. He will be going back to Sussex to write up the results. Even the
Lady Annabelle
has been saved and Edward has offered him the use of the boat whenever he wants. Somehow he doesn't think Ruth will be joining him on board.

‘It's a great party,' says Ruth.

‘You know what party animals archaeologists are.'

Ruth looks over to where two earnest women are discussing Roman pottery, and smiles.

‘Let me know when the hard drugs start circulating.'

‘I've got something to show you,' says Max.

Ruth looks at him warily. She feels that she has had enough surprises to last her a lifetime. But Max is smiling and the
party is going on all round them. Surely the underworld is far away.

Max takes her hand and leads her to his car. The front window is slightly open and on the back seat is a large black dog. When the dog sees them it goes mad with delight, wagging its entire back end. It is a slim, slinky animal with a whiskery, smiling face. Ruth finds herself smiling back.

‘Do you remember the breathing you heard on the site? I said I thought it might be a dog?' asks Max, leaning in to pat the now delirious dog. ‘Well, this is her. She's a stray, been hanging round the site for weeks, so I thought I'd take her in.'

‘A dog is for life …' says Ruth, pointing to the car sticker.

‘Well, exactly. And I think I need some company.' Max's face darkens momentarily but lightens when the dog leaps through the window and flings herself on him.

‘She wants to join the party,' says Ruth, who is thinking that the dog is more gregarious than she is. A party animal.

‘I'd better put her on the lead,' says Max. ‘She might get overexcited with so many people about.'

‘What's her name?'

‘Claudia.' Max grins. ‘It's a suitably Roman name and she does have claws, as I know to my cost.'

Ruth pats the leaping, wriggling dog. ‘Will you have room for her in Brighton?'

‘Yes, I've got a garden and I'm looking forward to long walks on the seafront. It'll keep me fit.'

He looks pretty fit already but Ruth does not say this. Max hands her Claudia's lead (slightly to her alarm) and rustles around in the boot of the Range Rover.

‘I've got something for you.'

He emerges with a carrier bag which he hands to Ruth.

‘What …?'

‘Look inside.'

Ruth looks and sees another dog. A stuffed one this time, rather battered by the years, but still smiling.

‘Elizabeth's dog,' says Max, rather thickly. ‘She called it Wolfie. I thought your baby should have it. It's ridiculous me keeping it, after all.'

Ruth looks from the stuffed dog to Max, holding Claudia on the lead, and her eyes suddenly fill with tears.

‘Thank you,' she says. ‘I'm very honoured.'

‘No doubt Nelson will say it constitutes a health hazard,' says Max, more briskly, ‘but I'm sure you won't listen to him.'

‘Why change the habit of a lifetime?'

They rejoin the party and Ruth unbends sufficiently to dance with Irish Ted. In the distance, she can see Cathbad building the inevitable bonfire.

‘You're a good mover for a pregnant lady,' says Ted.

‘Thank you.'

He smiles, gold tooth glinting, and Ruth remembers what she has always wanted to ask him. Leaning forward, she whispers, ‘Why are you called Irish Ted?'

‘Don't tell anyone,' whispers back Ted. ‘I am Irish but I'm not really called Ted.'

*

It is past midnight but the bonfire is still glowing. Ruth walks slowly down the hill. She is exhausted but it was a good party. Cathbad has danced in honour of the Sun God, Max has finished his dig and gained a companion, and she
isn't going home alone. She smiles at the woman walking next to her. It had been Cathbad who suggested that she invite her mother – ‘Gaia the Earth Goddess, you know. The eternal mother. It's all linked' – and, rather to Ruth's surprise, her mother had readily accepted. She has spent the evening talking to Max about mosaics, singing madrigals with the Druids, and dancing with both Clough and Ted. Now, she puts an arm round Ruth.

‘Tired?'

‘A bit.'

‘We'll go home and have a nice cup of tea. Then you should go to bed. You need your sleep when you're pregnant.'

Roman mothers, thinks Ruth, were probably saying the same thing to their daughters on this same site, two thousand years ago. Come in and sit by the hearth, have some herbal infusion and pray to Hecate for a safe delivery.

Everything changes but nothing is destroyed.

Special thanks must go to my aunt Marjorie Scott-Robinson who has been an invaluable source of information on Norfolk, ghosts, tides and the best way to get a large boat under a low bridge. For this and for all the laughter and encouragement – Marge, thank you.

There are, as far as I know, no Roman remains at Swaffham but there is a wonderful Roman site nearby, at Caister St Edmund. Similarly, though Norwich is rich in wonderful houses, Woolmarket Street is fictional. Norwich Castle does indeed house a magnificent museum but the exhibits I mention are (apart from the teapots) imaginary.

Thanks to Andrew Maxted, Matthew Pope and Lucy Sibun for their archaeological expertise. Particular thanks to Lucy for her insights into life as a forensic archaeologist. However, I have only followed the experts' advice as far as it suits the plot and any resulting mistakes are mine alone. Thanks also to Graham Ranger for his unforgettable description of the ‘smell' of crime.

Heartfelt thanks to my editor Jane Wood, my agent Tif Loehnis and to all at Quercus and Janklow and Nesbit. Love and thanks always to my husband Andrew and to our children Alex and Juliet.

For Gabriella, who also avoided Halloween.

November

Two people, a man and a woman, are walking along a hospital corridor. It is obvious that they have been here before. The woman's face is soft, remembering; the man looks wary, holding back slightly at the entrance to the ward. Indeed, the list of restrictions printed on the door looks enough to frighten anyone. No flowers, no phones, no children under eight, no coughers or sneezers. The woman points at the phone sign (a firmly crossed out silhouette of a rather dated-looking phone) but the man just shrugs. The woman smiles, as if she is used to getting this sort of response from him.

They press a buzzer and are admitted.

Three beds in, they stop. A brown-haired woman is sitting up in bed holding a baby. She is not feeding it, she is just looking at it, staring, as if she is trying to memorise every feature. The visiting woman, who is blonde and attractive, swoops down and kisses the new mother. Then she bends over the baby, brushing it with her hair. The baby opens
opaque dark eyes but doesn't cry. The man hovers in the background and the blonde woman gestures for him to come closer. He doesn't kiss mother or baby but he says something which makes both women laugh indulgently.

The baby's sex is easy to guess: the bed is surrounded by pink cards and rosettes, even a slightly deflated balloon announcing ‘It's a girl'. The baby herself, though, is dressed in navy blue as if the mother is taking an early stand against such stereotyping. The blonde woman holds the baby, who stares at her with those dark, solemn eyes. The brown-haired woman looks at the man, and looks away again quickly.

When visiting time is over, the blonde woman leaves presents and kisses and one last caress of the baby's head. The man stands at the foot of the bed, pawing the ground slightly as if impatient to be off. The mother smiles, cradling her baby in an ageless gesture of serene maternity.

At the door, the blonde woman turns and waves. The man has already left.

But five minutes later he is back, alone, walking fast, almost running. He comes to a halt by the bed. Wordlessly, the woman puts the baby into his arms. She is crying, though the baby is still silent.

‘She looks like you,' she whispers.

March

The tide is out. In the early evening light, the sands stretch into the distance, bands of yellow and grey and gold. The water in the rock pools reflects a pale blue sky. Three men and a woman walk slowly over the beach, occasionally stooping and looking intently at the ground, taking samples and photographs. One of the men holds something that looks rather like a staff, which he plants into the sand at regular intervals. They pass a lighthouse marooned on a rock, its jaunty red and white paint peeling, and a beach where a recent rock fall means that they have to wade in the sea, splashing through the shallow water. Now the coastline has transformed into a series of little coves which appear to have been eaten out of the soft, sandstone cliff. Their progress slows when they have to clamber over rocks slippery with seaweed and the remains of old sea walls. One of the men falls into the water and the other men laugh, the sound echoing in the still evening air. The woman trudges on ahead, not looking back.

Eventually they reach a spot where the cliff juts out into the sea, forming a bleak headland. The land curves away sharply, leaving a v-shaped inlet where the tide seems to be moving particularly fast. White-topped waves race towards jagged rocks and the seagulls are calling wildly. High up, on the furthest point of the cliff, is a grey stone house, faintly gothic in style, with battlements and a curved tower facing out to sea. A Union Jack is flying from the tower.

‘Sea's End House,' says one of the men, stopping to rest his back.

‘Doesn't that MP live there?' asks another.

The woman has stopped at the far side of the bay and is looking across at the house. The battlements are dark grey, almost black, in the fading light.

‘Jack Hastings,' she says. ‘He's an MEP.'

Although the woman is the youngest of the four and has a distinctly alternative look – purple spiky hair, piercings and an army surplus jacket – the others seem to treat her with respect. Now one of the men says, almost pleadingly, ‘Don't you think we should knock off, Trace?'

The man holding the staff, a bald giant known as Irish Ted, adds, ‘There's a good pub here. The Sea's End.'

The other men stifle smiles. Ted is famous for knowing every pub in Norfolk, no mean feat in a county reputed to have a pub for every day of the year.

‘Let's just walk this beach,' says Trace, getting out a camera. ‘We can take some GPS readings.'

‘Erosion's bad here,' says Ted. ‘I've been reading about it. Sea's End House has been declared unsafe. Jack Hastings is
in a right old two and eight. Keeps ranting on about an Englishman's home being his castle.'

They all look up at the grey house on the cliff. The curved wall of the tower is only two or three feet from the precipice. The remains of a fence hang crazily in midair.

‘There was a whole garden at the back of the house once. Summer house, the lot,' says Craig, one of the men. ‘My granddad used to do the gardening.'

‘Beach has silted up too,' says Trace. ‘That big storm in February has shifted a lot of stone.'

They all look towards the narrow beach. Below the cliffs, banks of pebbles form a shelf which then falls steeply into the sea. It's an inhospitable place, hard to imagine families picnicking here, children with buckets and spades, sun-bathing adults.

‘Looks like a cliff fall,' says Ted.

‘Maybe,' says Trace. ‘Let's get some readings anyway.'

She leads the way along the beach, keeping to the edge of the cliff. A sloping path leads from Sea's End House down to the sea and fishing boats are moored higher up, above the tide line, but the sea is coming in fast.

‘There's no way off the beach this side,' says the man whose grandfather was a gardener. ‘We don't want to get cut off.'

‘It's shallow enough,' says Trace. ‘We can wade.'

‘The current's treacherous here,' warns Ted. ‘We'd better head straight for the pub.'

Trace ignores him; she is photographing the cliff face, the lines of grey and black with the occasional shocking stripe of red. Ted plunges his staff into the ground and takes
a GPS reading. The third man, whose name is Steve, wanders over to a point where a fissure in the cliff has created a deep ravine. The mouth of the ravine is filled up with stones, probably from a rock fall. Steve starts to climb over the rubble, his boots slipping on the loose stones.